Oh, I've had worse days. It's just that today wasn't all that great.
Smirk called as I was heading into work to warn me that one of our servers
was dead. The one that wasn't backed up because we kept meaning to move
sites off that server because we knew it would fail at some point in time
(but we got it working later in the day and backed up).

P was still recoving from having done an upgrade on another server; he
broke the cardinal rule: “if it ain't broke—don't fix it!” Although all
he was trying to do was upgrade to PHP 5 but well, Insipid, the
control panel didn't like that one bit—at least, on that version
of the control panel on that version of the operating system.

Which meant I couldn't turn the server that
overheated a little over a week ago back on (I kept it off until I was sure
the A/C wouldn't fail), since I
needed the crash cart, and P was too busy using that to recover from the
upgrade.

R (I manage a few servers for him) called a few times about the lack of
email. His ISP is The
Monopolistic Phone Company, and they will, at the drop of a hat, refuse to
accept email from the outside, and since his email address is through his
domain, hosted on his server, all this lovely spam gets directed through
his server towards The Monopolistic Phone Company, which doesn't
like that very much (this has only happened about a bazillion times this
month alone).

Then there was the new customer circuit. It sounded promising at
first—they have a Cisco router and don't need us to manage it. And it's
an ethernet connection (they're in the same building, just down the hall) so
it's nothing terribly complicated—I have them some IP addresses (earlier this week) and
truthfully, wasn't expecting much problem.

Only they weren't as clueful as I expected—it's Ethernet,
not a T-1, connection. Which necessitated a rethink on the
IP routing (I have them two
small blocks thinking they'd be routing through their Cisco, but since they
couldn't use it, they wanted a single larger block), and all this at around
5:30 pm (of course!).

The whole day at the office was like this—small problems that just
wouldn't go away.

Smirk calls such days “Day 10,” as in “they only happen every ten days or
so.”

Obligatory Miscellaneous

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